Sách EBOOK: The Brand Bubble - John Gerzema and Ed Lebar

The Brand Bubble - John Gerzema and Ed Lebar (266 pages)

The Looming Crisis in Brand
Value and How to Avoid It


Foreword by Peter Stringham, CEO
Young & Rubicam Group

Contents
Foreword ix
By Peter Stringham, CEO, Young & Rubicam Group
PART ONE: INTRODUCTION 1
1 Tulipmania and Infl ated Brands 5
2 Can You Say “Irresistible”? 32
3 Wall Street, Meet Main Street 57
4 The Postmodern Craving for Creativity 77
5 Welcome to ConsumerLand 87
PART TWO: APPLICATION 113
6 Stage One—Exploration: Performing an Energy Audit 119
Case study: LEGO—Play Well
7 Stage Two—Distillation: Identifying the Energy Core 153
Case study: Virgin Atlantic—Brilliant Basics, Magic Touches
8 Stage Three—Ignition: Creating an Energized Value Chain 179
Case study: Xerox—The Energy Inside
9 Stage Four—Fusion: Becoming an Energy-Driven Enterprise 199
Case study: Mumbai Tiffi n Box Suppliers—Human Energy
10 Stage Five—Renewal: Active Listening and Constant Refreshing of Brand Meaning 218
Case study: UNIQLO—Seeing Farther Epilogue: A Brand May Be Famous, But Is It Creating Return for Shareholders? 233
Notes 235
Acknowledgments 241
The Authors 243
Index 245



Foreword
This book has an important message — not just for marketers, but also for CEOs, fi nancial analysts, and anyone who invests in consumer - facing companies. Every professional today must be acutely aware of the creative and management efforts required to launch a brand and sustain its profi tability in the marketplace. We live and die on the strategic decisions that we must invent each day to ensure that our products capture not only dollars but also imaginations.
That ’ s why the theories in this book are so critical. The message of The Brand Bubble will no doubt be as much of a shock to
you as it was to me: that many, many brands are in serious trouble. I have no doubt that this bubble is already occurring, and it will
probably continue. I applaud John and Ed for bringing this story out and making sense of it all. Their analysis of the problems
devaluing brands today and their recommendations for possible solutions are insightful and worthy of attention.
Those who read this book will need to interpret its thesis in terms of the metrics they use to assess their own brand ’ s performance. The
same is true for the management and marketing recommendations presented in the second half of the book. No one knows for certain
how to transform a brand caught in the brand bubble. While this book gives you some remedies, we are entering a whole new area of
marketing thought. Discovering what solutions are right for you will require some testing and learning. Frankly, we do not have all the
answers, but what we do have is the ability to assess how much individual brands are affected by this worrisome trend.
If there is one thing I can confi rm, it is that this book is based on evidence from an amazingly accurate research tool that Y & R has
maintained for more than fi fteen years, BrandAsset ® Valuator, (BAV). I can attest to the BAV ’ s accuracy from personal experience
as an agency executive and as a CMO.
I fi rst learned of BAV in 1997 when Peter Georgescu and Alex Kroll, the original champions of BAV recruited me for a position at Y & R. I was, first of all, very impressed that an agency would invest tens of millions of its own dollars researching brands and consumer attitudes. But then I was even more impressed by the fact that it was the only analysis of how brands are built that had been tested against the fi nancial metrics that create enterprise value. In the end, the BAV was one of the factors that led me to accept a job with Y & R as CEO of its North American operations. Then, in 2001, I left to join HSBC in London as CMO, responsible for global marketing and brand development. Prior

to my arrival, HSBC had been struggling to create a unified brand message in the minds of the millions of customers the company had picked up through dozens of acquisitions. Having originated as the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, HSBC was by this time the world ’ s second - largest bank, composed of individual banks in dozens of countries around the world, all rebranded with the HSBC livery. To understand what the brand needed, I contacted one of my old colleagues at Y & R and asked him for the BAV profi le on the banking industry.
The data and insights in that profi le revealed what had to be done to make a world - class brand for HSBC. With the BAV data setting the guideposts, coupled with qualitative research that gave insight into what I call the DNA of HSBC, we created the positioning of “ The world ’ s local bank. ” The results were remarkable. In fi ve years, HSBC went from a brand value of $100 million to $11 billion!
When I returned to Y & R in 2007 as its worldwide CEO, I discovered that in my absence, the company had discovered something new in the BAV data — the rumblings of the brand bubble described in this book. It proved to me that BAV is a living, evolving study. It constantly throws out new ways of looking at brands. It is a marvelous sieve that dredges up some amazing nuggets, if you have the right people to assay them and the determination to apply their advice. John and Ed lay out some very intriguing and challenging dilemmas in this book, which should occupy us all for some time. I hope you enjoy the challenge!
New York City Peter Stringham
July 2008 CEO, Young & Rubicam Group